Twilight Robbery (34 page)

All this will pass
, she seemed to say.
Everything that seems so large and inescapable now I will grind down in my pestle, and in a century it will be a fine powder that nobody will notice. There is no crime you have committed, no pain you have felt, that I cannot grind to nothing so that the world forgets it, in the fullness of time
.

This was no comfort to Mosca at all. In fact, she reflected, she didn’t much like the idea of a fine, powdery world where nothing really mattered in the long run. She preferred her world painful, and lumpy, and full of chaff.

One such human piece of chaff was clearly on clock-mending duty. A basket was suspended from the crane on the tower roof, and a man in overalls could be seen standing precariously inside it. The clock face had been levered open, and he was leaning over with some long-handled tool to tweak reverently at its metal innards. All the while Goodlady Adwein smiled and smiled, caring nothing for him.

Mosca scuttled past the tower to the agreed place in the town wall. Out of her pocket she drew a letter written hastily by moonlight, dropped a single eyelash in among the folds and squeezed it into a crevice between two bricks as arranged. This was her lifeline, the only rope that might stop her plummeting to disaster. She had no choice but to cling to it, even if the other end was held by Eponymous Clent.

After Mosca Mye had returned to the house of the Leaps, the night air took on a more determined chill.

Eventually the sky paled, and nature began its own changing of the guard, the owls retreating to their crofts and rafters to huddle like tufted urns. Those rooks and crows who had not been grabbed overnight by hungry boys with catapults and bags took to the air, knowing by some instinct that a generous breakfast previously known as Havoc Gray was making his way towards the sea on the back of the Langfeather.

And below them, Toll-by-Night set about folding itself away, like a stilt-legged monster into a closet. It inhabitants crept back into the unwanted places, the crannies and cellars and forgotten attics, and locked themselves in.

A bugle blew. A silver jingling swept through the town, sealing away all bad reputations and bitter-tasting names.

Another bugle sounded. And Day swept in like a landlord, not knowing that it was only a guest in Night’s town.

Being locked away at night with the dayfolk had been claustrophobic, but at least there had been something familiar about it. After all, who had not seen an innkeeper drop a heavy bolt against the predations of the night?

It was a very different matter sitting in the Leaps’ strange narrow room, lit only by a few rushlights, and hearing the dawn chorus offering tentative chips of sound outside. In spite of the darkness and chill of the room, one could tell it was day, one could feel it in one’s bones.

Then came footsteps, sounding recklessly clear after all the hushed bustle of the night, criers calling the hour, hawkers bold with their wares. Mosca realized that she had been thinking of Toll-by-Day as impossibly remote from her, and it was weird to realize that the barrier between them was less than a hand’s span thick.

Her back was to the door, and she nearly leaped out of her skin when a rubbery bang reverberated just behind her. Only when it occurred again did she realize that it was the sound of a ball being bounced against the door, or more likely against a panel concealing the door. Her hand tightened into a fist, and it was all she could do not to knock out a response. But she restrained herself. She was a phantom in a house that did not exist.

The days were shortening, so Mosca made herself a nest of rugs by the cooling hearth, knowing that she would need all the sleep she could get. But the raucous sounds and raw alertness of day seemed to seep in under the door and down the chimney, and stung her mind awake. The Leaps were no help at all either. They appeared to have no interest in sleeping. Again and again she was jolted by the creak of a spinning wheel, or a
flip-flip-flip
of pages turning, or the groan of furniture and boxes as the Leaps clambered over them with balletic ease, or clicks and squeaks as Welter fiddled with some contraption in his workshop.

They barely spoke, but every few minutes Mistress Leap would knock a double-tap on the nearest piece of furniture in order to get her husband’s attention and then perform a series of rapid mimes that completely baffled Mosca’s eye. Welter responded to these silent gambits by jumping at each rap-rap as if stung, turning a gaze of icy weariness upon his wife, then looking away with the bleak countenance of a long-term prisoner.

Saracen did not help either, since he was in a mood to clamber damply across Mosca’s face. He was restless, very wet and, Mosca was concerned to notice, green. Evidently the dye-bath had not been thrown out after Mosca’s dip, and Saracen had made delighted use of his new miniature pond.

Mosca’s conversation with Brand Appleton spun around and around in her head like a carriage wheel, jolting into the potholes of her surmises and fears. Tomorrow she would see him again, and this time there would be no way to stop him seeing her. What if he brought Skellow with him? Was her disguise good enough? Would the promised reinforcements from Sir Feldroll be sufficient for an ambush?

And as her mind crowded with night-worries, night-plans, she ceased to hear the rumble of barrows and hand-clap songs outside. It was background music, nothing more. Already the day world was starting to seem just a little less real.

Although most did not know it, little pieces of night were abroad in Toll-by-Day. Who would suspect them? They all had good names. And in such a cold month, who would remark upon the fact that they all wore gloves, or guess that the right-hand glove of each hid a key-shaped brand? Even now the gloves were abroad, all busy in the same cause.

One pair quietly closing the door to the mayor’s study, then picking delicately through his letters. Ah, a letter from the mayor of Waymakem. That looked interesting. The left glove held the letter prisoner while the right prised away the seal. ‘Honoured Sir, We call upon you once again to join us in Cutting Out the Malign Growth that is Radical Enthusiasm and allowing our Troops Passage through your Town so that we might Drive these Usurpers out of Man-delion.’ Fascinating. The letter was returned deftly to its envelope, the sealing wax softened in a flame and pressed back into place.

In the Committee of the Hours, another pair of gloves dropped a few coins into the waiting hand of young Kenning, who obligingly found something very important to do in a back room while the gloves turned the pages of a book of admissions to the daylight town, a forefinger running down the column of names and coming to a halt on a pair of entries.

A third set of gloves tap-a-tapped a table in an inn, a table that offered an excellent view of a particular stretch of town wall. The tap-a-tapping only faltered when a certain plump poet known to his friends, admirers, enemies and creditors as Eponymous Clent strolled into view and came to a halt against exactly that portion of wall. His hands were behind him as if to cushion his back, while he gazed with apparent poetic rapture at the porridgey massing of the clouds above. His reverie over, Clent was on the move again, tucking something into his waistcoat pocket.

The gloves threw a coin down on to the table, then off they went in pursuit, the left glove slapping a hat on to a balding head, the right swinging a cane jauntily in time with the stride of a couple of well-brushed shoes. Nobody could suspect that anybody who walked so boldly and breezily could be a spy following a mark.

Clent himself walked in a leisurely fashion as if strolling alongside his muse, occasionally offering small bows to any passing ladies. Only his tendency to extend the same courtesy to small trees, empty sedan chairs and tethered whippets hinted at some distraction of mind. And after him went the gloves, the hat, the cane, the well-brushed shoes.

Clent took sudden turns through narrow passages, and the gloves took short cuts and quietly appeared behind him in the next street. Clent dallied to listen to a travelling orator, who was holding forth on the dangers of malignant levellers, to a relatively warm reception. The gloves waited in the crowd, applauding politely from time to time. Clent frowned at his watch, sped around the nearest corner . . . and the gloves rounded the turn after him, only to run head first into a substantial helping of Eponymous Clent.

A jolt of bodies. Near loss of balance. Each reaching out instinctively to steady the other, a recovery of equilibrium.

‘Ah – a thousand apologies!’

‘No, no, the fault is all mine –’

‘I have not ruffled your –’

‘No, see, all is well.’

The gloves had no choice but to continue past the poet at the same steady, jaunty pace until they were quite out of view. At the nearest corner, however, they halted so that their owner could peer back into the street, blunt moleskin fingers tap-a-tapping against the bricks.

Too late. The street that had held Eponymous Clent did so no longer. Somehow the portly poet had slithered through that gap of a few seconds and vanished into the crowd. The gloves tightened into fists of frustration, to a background harmony of sotto voce swearing.

A few streets away, Eponymous Clent strolled on in his ponderous fashion, his eyes skittering from one side of the road to the other in search of pursuers, his heart pattering like rain. During his collision, he had ‘steadied’ his pursuer with a firm hand at belt level and had felt the shape of a chatelaine beneath the cloth. He had been followed by a Locksmith. Worse still, he had left that Locksmith feeling foolish.

‘Ah – Mr Clent!’ The footman had barely opened the door to Clent’s knock when Sir Feldroll pushed past him, dapperly dressed in a scarlet redingote which brought out the redness in the lids of his sleep-starved eyes. ‘Mr Clent, what word? Your girl . . . the drop . . . is there word?’ His mouth quivered through a thousand nervous little shapes, while his eyes made high-speed reconnaissance missions across Clent’s countenance and aspect, noting the latter’s breathlessness and dishevelled air.

Clent gave a ruffled nod. ‘Ah, yes – news indeed, my lord, but a closed-doors matter, methinks.’ He cast a small significant glance at the footman, who was doing his best to veil his interest in the exchange. ‘Not words that we should let the wind catch.’

He was shown into the breakfast room, where he offered a somewhat distracted bow to the mayor. However, Clent might as well have capered in jester’s weeds for all the attention his courtesy earned. As soon as he pulled a letter from his pocket, nobody had eyes or thoughts for anything else.

The mayor seized it first, and read it aloud with a deepening frown.

‘Have found Lodgings with those persons we spoke of. BA well known hereabouts for getting Knocked Silly so he can win Candied Violets & Preserv’d Cherries & like Frippries for You Know Which Lady. I have spoke with him and will meet with him tomorrow when it would be well to have some Strong Arms to heft Cudgels so those Friends of our Friend needed Soon as Possible. Also think my Landlords might be a bit pixillated.’

‘Does anybody have the faintest idea what this means?’ The mayor’s eyebrows shot up interrogatively into two grey steel arches, and he thrust the missive into the eager hand of Sir Feldroll.

The younger man read it with an expression very like pain, tracing the lines with his fingertip again and again in his determination to absorb their meaning.

‘She’s alive,’ he murmured at last. ‘The sweetmeats – it must be for Miss Marlebourne. So she is definitely alive. And –’ the page quivered in his hand, and he smoothed it with his fingers as if trying to calm it – ‘at least . . . at least this ruffian Appleton seems to be taking some pains to see her treated well.’

‘Naturally, naturally,’ Clent cut in soothingly. ‘Dark as their hearts might be, those villains would as soon bowl with their own heads as harm that child. She is worth a fortune to most of them, and the very world to one of them, is she not?’

Sir Feldroll dropped into a chair. One sleepless night had evidently allowed him all too much leisure to imagine dark and terrible events befalling the mayor’s daughter.

‘And it would seem –’ Clent tapped the letter – ‘that our young spy has convinced Appleton to meet with her. BA can only be Brand Appleton.’

‘But why does she not describe the place where they are to meet?’ The mayor tweaked the letter back into his own grasp and tried to stare it into submission. ‘And these people with whom she is staying – who are they? Where are they? Why is she so damnably cryptic?’

Clent paused, drawing in a breath through pursed lips, and examined the mayor’s boots as if trying to guess their price.

‘Ah, yes,’ he answered pleasantly. ‘A curious string of obfuscations . . . but not I think inexplicable ones. Recall that she is a fly-child, fostered and fed all her life long on mistrust. Naturally she has a darkling mind and habits of secrecy. It is in her nature. It is in her name. And in this case . . . it is a very good thing. A very good thing indeed.’

‘What? What do you mean?’ asked Sir Feldroll.

‘I mean that if Mosca Mye had included the names of her hosts and the location of their dwelling in that letter I would not give
this
–’ he snapped his fingers – ‘for her life right now.’ Eponymous Clent drew himself up, his native sense of theatre overwhelming him for a second. ‘Gentlemen, someone has smelt us out. We are detected, decoded, discovered. Somebody was watching the letter drop.’

He left a dramatic pause, which his companions obligingly filled with consternation and exclamation.

‘With some degree of ingenuity,’ he continued, ‘I succeeded in losing the man who sought to follow me back here, but not before I had made good view of him. A Locksmith – I would stake my wits on it. The Locksmiths have doubtless read this letter, but left it where they found it so that we would suspect nothing and send a response, allowing them to learn more. So let us all spare a moment to thank Goodman Palpitattle for the tricky habits of mind that made young Mosca loath to include her own name – or anybody else’s – in her letter.’